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So a new peace treaty for Ukraine war just dropped .
Trump’s proposed Ukraine peace plan would recognize Crimea as Russian, accept Russian control over parts of Donbas and southern Ukraine, and offer Ukraine vague European security guarantees, unfettered access to Dnieper partial territorial returns, and U.S.-backed reconstruction. It also includes U.S. control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and a U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal. Vance said that the deal is final and in the case of rejection US will stop being a part of peacemaking process.
I think it's basically a great deal for both sides(I admit my bias cause for me any peace would be better than war). Ukraine loses nothing that it de facto has right now and gains territory in Kharkov, it can finally heal and maybe with some smart leadership, international investment and membership in EU it can rise to the heights of neighboring Poland, I doubt that it will and I already written on the motte why, but some chance is way better than no chance.
For Russia and specifically for Putin this is a way to claim victory after his many failures including starting this retarded SMO. Maybe for Russian state it would be better to deal with this close of an enemy once and for all, but it will not happen under current leadership and Putin is no nationalist, so even with total victory we would see semi puppet state in Ukraine that would break of as soon as possible. We are talking about person who still haven't annexed Belarus for christ sake.
I think kremlins are ready to accept this and even slightly worse versions of this deal, cause they already shown signs of it throught whole war, starting in March of 2022 and dictators are more likely to seek limited peace anyway. On the other hand Europe is actually putting some effort into its militarization, I'v seen news about new German ammunition facilities, and could collectively decide to continue the war even if US fully withdraws after rejecting the deal(which is in my opinion unlikely). That could prolong the conflict by another couple of years, probably lead to the Ukrainian territory gains but I can't see how it's worth the devastation that it would cause.
Honestly the best thing Putin could do is accept it. Ukraine will never accept it, so it is a safe bet.
What would their alternative be? Ukraine is being pressured along the entire front. They haven't had a proper attack since August, in which they claimed an equivalent of less than 1% of the land they have lost while attack an area that the Russians barely were defending. Ukraine is facing a demographic crisis not seen since the collapse of Rome.
Ukrainian nationalists seem to be wildly detached from reality. They want a national socialist state financed by Keir starmer after their war has a miraculous turn around in which they go from being pressed back to smashing through the Russian lines and Russia collapsing. At some point they have to stop speaking in slogans and start focusing on what is practical. Their negotiating position isn't improving with time.
Ukrainian nationalists can just maintain their position of maximum fuck Russia or bust. It's not a war of extermination, they can survive the dissolution of Ukraine as a state and it's probably going to feel better knowing they "fought to the last" rather than becoming a cucked rump state.
It's not clear that Ukraine as a people can survive continued war. Their demographics were already terrible and tons of dead and fleeing reproductive-age people occurs to me as likely to be fatal. Then again the worst case scenario has already basically happened, so yeah, I guess they may as well ride the thing to zero. Sucks for the ones who wanted to live though.
Apart from Ukraine being conquered by Russia and forcibly assimilated, what would "Ukraine as a people to survive" mean here? Even if their population levels are drastically reduced, well, there are nations half the size of Ukrainians surviving as a people, even triple or quarter the size of Ukrainians. The Paraguayans were able to survive the War of the Triple Alliance. It would mean huge amounts of death, to be sure, but that's still different from national extinction.
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Ukraine as a people definitely can't survive Russian victory - Putin has made clear that he considers Ukrainians to be misguided Russians who need to be forcibly shown which country they actually belong to, and is implementing this policy in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine.
They did survive years under Russian Empire rulers of which had the same views as Putin. Also in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine Ukrainian language is a second official one and you can choose to learn it in school.
Russian Empire was basically unable to utilize state power to anywhere close to the degree that a modernized state could, though it was starting to make up the difference already in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine heavily ethnically Russian, and weren't the Ukrainians pursuing a similar policy of forcible assimilation? (I may well be wrong.)
Ukraine has often been part of Russia and their distinctiveness has always seemed to me tenuous at best. FWIW I developed this opinion over a decade ago after spending some time with Ukrainians in the US who were very insistent that they're totally different from Russians and gave me several examples which left me entirely unconvinced. Basically everything came down to regional vocabulary differences. That's not a matrioshka doll, it's a $ukrainian_word_for_exact_same_thing! Based on my mostly-uninformed assessment, Ukrainian can't really be called a dialect of Russian but they have like 2/3 overlap and from a cultural standpoint they're nearly indistinguishable. Easy for an outsider to think, I suppose.
I agree, which of course gives the Russians the right to claim their territory and then ethnically cleanse them. The Americans and British don't even speak different languages, so obviously the UK should ethnically cleanse the US as well.
Who has any right to land? Either you can defend it or someone else will have it. There's only 'is' here, no 'ought'.
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Casual encounters and visits to England and Ireland might also leave one convinced that they are basically the same nationality on the basis of not only language but also surface aspects (left side of the road, two faucets, crap insulation etc.), and yet... (or England and US/Australia/Canada/whatever.)
Well, yes -- part of Ireland is already the UK and if the rest were to unite with the UK I wouldn't be losing sleep over the erasure of the Irish as a people. Scotland already did, and it's still there. Wales too. Sure they'd like to be independent but that's clearly a want, not a need.
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Do you make any distinctions between Germany, Austria, the 17 Germanophone Swiss cantons, the Alto Adige, etc.?
Sure; such things can be subdivided fractally. But if I heard all those people were henceforth to be under a single government I wouldn't be thinking "Oh no the unique Austrian culture will now be subsumed into Greater Mitteleuropa!" It would make a lot of sense for them to share a government IMO.
Though, the Swiss have a long history of self-government which is unlike anything to be found in Ukraine, so I doubt they'd be much interested. Else they'd be in the EU.
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That started because of the 2022 war, when people chose to stop speaking Russian because the Russian army was shelling them and then the government started e.g. removing Pushkin statues.
Ethnic data's difficult because terms like native language actually mean ancestral language, so people will e.g. claim to be natives of a language they don't speak. Of course, you also get wild 20% swings in different censuses as identities are relatively meaningless. A rather small amount of Easterners claimed to be ethnically Russian, but used Russian in all situations. N.b. I was a staunch "Ukrainian isn't a "real" identity" type (but very supportive of its independence, because many Ruses would lead to many courts and renaissance, like in Italy and Germany's golden ages. The languages are very close, effectively a few hundred unique roots and different 1:1 changes in the realization of others. Anyway, I never felt a need to use Ukrainian and never encountered it in day to day life.
No, it started after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. As far back as 2019, the Council of Europe's "Commission for Democracy through Law" issued a scathing report on Ukraine's oppression of the Russian language.
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